R.I.'s Thomas Lincoln Casey, man behind the Washington Monument

Sunday

Jan 7, 2018 at 6:36 PMJan 7, 2018 at 6:36 PM

The Saunderstown resident also shaped the architectural landscape of the nation's capital, overseeing construction of two of its more prominent buildings, the Executive Office Building across the street from the West Wing of the White House and the Library of Congress.

John Hill Journal Staff Writer jghilliii

NORTH KINGSTOWN — If you’ve ever taken in the view of Washington, D.C., from atop the Washington Monument, or had to have your thigh muscles massaged after taking the stairway down, you can thank, or curse, Thomas Lincoln Casey.

He was a member of the family that lived on Casey farm off Boston Neck Road in Saunderstown for 200 years, producing an admiral, generals, engineers and scientists. But the one who left the most visible mark was probably Thomas Lincoln, the man who finished the Washington Monument.

Casey died in 1896 at the age of 65, after an Army career that saw him rise to the rank of brigadier general and chief of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

He also shaped the architectural landscape of the nation’s capital, overseeing construction of two of its more prominent buildings, the Executive Office Building across the street from the West Wing of the White House and the Library of Congress.

But his most well-known accomplishment is leading the effort to complete, 24 years after it was abandoned, construction of what’s probably the nation’s most iconic memorial.

When Congress gave Casey the job in 1878, he was a lieutenant colonel and head of the Office of Public Buildings and Grounds in Washington, D.C.

The first effort to build the monument petered out in 1854 amid technical and managerial incompetence. It left a 170-foot-tall square pile of marble, less than a third of the intended height, that Mark Twain mocked as an “ungainly old chimney.”

Paul K. Walker, a retired historian for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers who has researched Casey and the monument effort, said Casey, a lieutenant colonel with the corps, had more than engineering skills to recommended him for the job.

“He was trusted with money,” Walker said. “He had proved on many other projects he could come in on budget.”

Casey worked well with civilians, Walker said, a valuable talent for a project that would be unfolding in front of every Washington power broker’s eyes.

“The work was done under the fire of ill-natured criticism on the part of the newspapers,” wrote Henry L. Abbot in an 1897 speech to the National Academy celebrating Casey’s career. “ … No little firmness and decision were needed under such conditions and Col. Casey showed himself to be the man for the occasion.”

The monument is known for its towering marble obelisk, but Casey buried his best work on the project. That’s because before the obelisk could be built up, Casey had to build a foundation strong enough to support it.

The fundamental problem Casey faced was how to strengthen and expand the monument’s foundation while the incomplete tower was still on top of it. The original foundation was inadequate; the partial monument was already leaning to the northwest.

Walker said Casey developed a plan to dig out pieces of the original foundation and the soil beneath and replace them with densely packed stone and cement. The workmen would dig in underneath simultaneously from opposite sides, Torres wrote, to keep the tower balanced as the men’s work shifted the ground beneath it. Casey had to constantly monitor the straightness of the tower, telling one group to slow down or the other to speed up to compensate for a shift to one side or the other.

“Thus the mass swayed at pleasure,” Abbot said in his 1897 speech.

Casey surrounded the rebuilt foundation with a continuing stone buttress, a slanted wall that sloped up to the edge of the monument all along sides, making it look like the monument was wearing a wide stone skirt. It held the foundation stones in place while the weight of the tower pushed down on them.

Casey’s men wound up replacing half of the old foundation, making it 13 feet deeper and two and a half times wider, Abbot said.

Terrence F. Paret, a senior principal with the firm of Wiss Janney Elstner and Associates, which was hired to fix damage to the monument after it was shaken by a magnitude 5.8 earthquake in 2011, said the firm’s engineers went to Casey’s papers to learn what they could about how it was built.

“The first thing is what a great engineer he really was,” Paret said. “He was brilliant.”

The work would have been impressive with the technology of the 21st century, Parent said. Doing it in the 1880s made it even more of an accomplishment.

“He’s doing all this without a calculator,” Paret said. ”They’re doing this with picks and shovels.”

A monument to the leader of the American Revolution may have been special for Casey. His grandfather Wanton Casey had joined Rhode Island’s Kentish Guards as a teenager during the American Revolution.

Casey would have seen the bullet holes in the walls of the Saunderstown house, where British troops, angry that the house was being used as an observation station, forced their way in and started firing.

Besides his Revolutionary War grandfather, Casey’s father, Silas Casey, was an Army general too, serving in the Mexican War and writing a manual on infantry tactics that was used by both sides in the Civil War. Thomas Lincoln’s brother, Silas Casey III, joined the Navy, becoming a rear admiral and commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet from 1901-03.

Casey died of a heart attack while heading to work on the Library of Congress. Besides the buildings he built, he left a voluminous trove of personal papers. For most of his adult life, he kept diagrams, letters and daily diaries in small notebooks the size of a pack of cigarettes, where he’d scribble about a project he was working on, a conversation with a congressman or his personal health.

In 1955 the Casey Farm, along with those papers, were given to Historic New England, a historic preservation organization that owns more than three dozen properties throughout New England, including the Clemence-Irons House in Johnston, the Arnold House in Lincoln and the Watson Farm in Jamestown.

It was those documents, now catalogued and kept in dozens of boxes in Historic New England’s archive in Boston, that let Casey, more than 120 years after he’d finished the job, to help fix the Washington Monument once again.

“That was insight that helped us,” Paret said, “that we needed to do our work.”

Thomas Lincoln Casey

1831 — Born in Sackett’s Harbor, N.Y.

1852 — Graduates from West Point, first in his class

1853-1861 — Teaches at West Point, works on coastal fortress projects in Pacific northwest

1861-67 — Supervises fort construction in Maine

1867 — Assigned to Corps of Engineers offices in Washington, D.C.

1877 — Assigned to supervise construction of Executive Office Building

1878 — Lt. colonel in Army Corps of Engineers appointed to complete Washington Monument